It was the best time of my life…
It was when I fell in love, over and over again…with…Ray Bradbury, Elmore (Dutch) Leonard, Sue Grafton, Fanny Flagg
And those were just some of them.
Where did I meet them? How did I fall in love with them?
It began during my first Santa Barbara Writers Conference (https://www.sbwriters.com/), somewhere in the mid-1990s.
Ray Bradbury was one of the opening speakers for the conference. That was his role since the beginning of the now 50-year-old conference. His talks were uplifting, inspiring. So much so that I dubbed him the Cosmic Cheerleader.
Throughout my times at SBWC, I was invited to dinner at Ray’s table, even sat next to him. It wasn’t difficult to talk with him, but for me, it was always better to listen to him, hear his stories. So many stories. When I had my first article printed in the local Whittier newspaper, I sent Ray a letter and a copy of the clipping. He wrote me back a luscious letter, with a hand drawn character on the envelope and his salutation of “Mad Love!” at the end of his letter. I still have both on a bookshelf dedicated to my treasures.
No one who was friends with him, called Elmore Leonard by his first name. He was Dutch. I was in a workshop at SBWC and read the opening chapter of my thriller manuscript. It began with a scene from the protagonist’s point of view. The workshop leader blasted my approach and my writing. I left the workshop trying to hold myself together. I walked the grounds of the old Miramar Hotel where the conference was held, and sat down on a bench. The details are a bit foggy as I tend to delete such horror stories from my brain, but Elmore Leonard walked over sat down with me. “I liked your opening chapter,” he said, as he puffed on a cigarette.
I was shocked. Shocked that he approached me. I had no idea that he was in the workshop and had listened to me read.
Dutch went on to talk of times when he had written 100 pages of a new book, and still had no idea of the plot. We talked of our common background of being Michiganders and he gave me his home address. I can’t remember all what he said, but I did come away from our talk confident that I was a writer, a good writer. We wrote back and forth a couple of times. In one letter I had mentioned that I really appreciated our 45-minute chat and he wrote back that he remembered it as a 15-minute chat.
I went to SBWC for 14 years and have made lifelong friends from my times there.
When I moved to Lake County from Sri Lanka, I only knew one person. I had visited a dear friend here in 1989 and had later given a poetry reading in Lakeport by invitation of Lake County’s first Poet Laureate, Jim Lyle. I fell in love with Lake County, fell in love with Library Park and its gazebo and vowed one day to live here.
Knowing that there was a vibrant writing community, I immediately joined the Writer’s Circle at the Main Street Gallery (https://lakearts.org/literary/writers-circle/), where I made my first Lake County friends.
Even during the pandemic, my contacts with my tribe of writers has pulled me through (along with my kittens) the isolation.
What’s a girl to do?…remember the writers I fell in love with, what they said, how freely they shared, and keep writing.
Lucy Llewellyn Byard is currently a columnist for the Record-Bee. To contact her, email lucywgtd@gmail.com
